Don Gutteridge - Vital Secrets

It is March 1837, and Upper Canada is as restive as ever. There had been high hopes when Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head engineered victory for the Tories in the election of June 1836. It was expected that a period of stability would be ushered in, and that the many grievances of the farmers and their representatives in the Reform Party would soon be addressed. It was not to be. Head proceeded to enact repressive legislation and thwart the efforts of the Reformers in the Legislature. Drought had gripped the province, and the banks, safe in the hands of the Family Compact, refused to grant credit. Moreover, the clergy-reserves question still rankled. One-seventh of all the usable land was set aside for the established Anglican Church and was being held uncleared until land prices improved. More grating was the deadlock in the provincial parliament, where the unelected legislative councillors vetoed legislation put forward by the elected Reformers that might favour the suffering population.

As a result of Head’s machinations, unrest had become increasingly widespread. A more radical wing of the Reform Party evolved under the strident direction of newspaper editor and politician William Lyon Mackenzie, who had lost his parliamentary seat in the 1836 election. Secret meetings and rallies took place throughout the countryside, and rumours of impending civil strife and the smuggling of arms from the United States were rampant. In a few months a new queen, Victoria, would be crowned, but she would bring no peace to the troubled colony.

For the second time since his arrival in the New World, Lieutenant Marc Edwards was setting out on a winter expedition to Cobourg and, this time, to places eastward to Kingston. On this occasion he was not alone, for at his side, cantering contentedly on a sleek, bay gelding and puffing coils of pipe-smoke into the air along with his frozen breath, was Major Owen Jenkin, quartermaster of His Majesty’s 24th Regiment of Foot. The newly risen sun floated above the horizon-line of the forest ahead of them like a disk of burnished brass, as the duo swung up the long curve of King Street towards Scaddings Bridge and the Kingston Road. Behind them, the capital city of the province lay rumpled and quiescent in its coverlet of snow.

“By Christ, but it’s good to be on the road again, eh, Marc?” Jenkin said without taking his teeth off the stem of his pipe.

And it was. Ever since he had resigned his post at Government House-on a matter of principle-and returned to the spartan barracks at Fort York after his second investigation, Marc had suffered the boredom of peacetime military routine. He didn’t regret his decision, but he had jumped at the chance to go foraging with Owen Jenkin.

“It was kind of you to invite me along, sir. I’m sure you could have managed quite well without me.”

Jenkin emitted a rumbling sort of laugh, one that began in his substantial belly and rose up through the smoky realms of his throat till it met the clamped jaws and had to wheeze its way past. The older man had the face of a fallen cherub, with rubicund cheeks so bulging they pinched against his thick eyebrows and made the dancing orbs of his eyes all the more prominent for having to operate in such a confined sphere. The lips, had they been visible beneath the flourishing and unfashionably grizzled beard, would have shown themselves fleshy and sensuous. Evidently the quartermaster was a man who had feasted upon the fruits of life and found them satisfactory.

“Since you’ve had the impertinence to question why I brought you along, lad, I’ll tell you. I’m told that when you came this way last winter on special assignment for the former governor, you passed yourself off as an agent for the quartermaster searching out reliable suppliers of pork and grain.”

“There are few secrets in a garrison, I see,” Marc said.

“I’m told also that your eye for quality and your nose for the bogus were as keen as a horse-trader’s.”

“You forget, sir, that I was part of that large foraging party you led two summers ago into the western region,” Marc said.

“I do not forget that at all. I was quite aware of you watching me and taking note of every detail of the operation. I also know you were raised on a country estate in Kent, where matters agricultural were close to hand and as natural as breathing air uncontaminated by London soot.”

“You know a great deal about me indeed,” Marc said in what he hoped was a respectful tone.

“Don’t look so worried, lad! I haven’t been spying on you. With a mug like mine, espionage would be a hazardous occupation, to say the least.”

Marc wondered how much, if anything, the major knew about what had happened last June when Marc had tried, and failed, to win the hand of Beth Smallman. Surely he couldn’t know that Beth had left her millinery shop in Toronto last January to return to Crawford’s Corners, near Cobourg, to nurse her ailing brother Aaron.

“To tell the truth, I’ve admired you and your deportment since the day you arrived here. Your exploits and actions are well remarked among the officers of the regiment.”

“I’m flattered, sir, but-”

“You’re too quick with a ‘but,’ lad,” Jenkin chortled. “The chief reason I rescued you from a death by boredom was entirely selfish: I can’t ride a mile unless I have someone to laugh at my witticisms.”

Any further talk was forestalled as they clattered across the planking of Scaddings Bridge, which spanned the frozen curve of the Don River. To their right they could see on the flats below the snow-softened outline of Enoch Turner’s brewery and Gooderham’s distillery with its giant Dutch windmill, whose broad appendages were utterly still in the windless winter air. Beyond these familiar signposts of civilization, the great lake sprawled frozen and silent to a far horizon. A few rods past the bridge, they entered the bush, through which meandered the only highroad linking Kingston and Toronto.

To his surprise, Marc found himself relaxing as the forest drew them into its infinite precincts. The irregular twenty-foot span of the road itself was now the only indication of a human presence. Invariably Marc had entered the bush-winter or summer-with nothing except a shudder and a prayer. But today the sun was shining as if it mattered. The rolling drifts and powdered mantle on bough and branch glistened and beckoned. It might have been England, except that here in the New World, he had begun to realize, bush and stream, insect and beast, lake and ice were the primary datum. All else was secondary. Once you accepted this irreversible fact, Marc thought, you could begin to feel the power and awful beauty of the wilderness.

The Kingston Road, for example, was a fanciful name attached to what was a wagon-track winding through the pine, fir, birch, and maple of the great boreal forest. It provided easy going for the pair of soldiers, as the rutted mélange of mud and corduroy was still frozen stiff, and the recent flurries had been packed down by constant coach- and foot-traffic. And where the odd tree had been downed and blown across the right-of-way, diligent farmers had hauled it aside and cleared away any accumulated drifts. With no wind and not a cloud anywhere in the blue vault above, they expected to travel the sixty miles or so to Cobourg easily. There they could seek out a welcoming hearth and a feather bed. And should their horses flag, they could stop for luncheon and a rest at the hamlet of Perry’s Corners. As Marc well knew, much land had been cleared in Northumberland County around Cobourg, and the quartermaster would be planning to visit the many farms there to make arrangements for the purchase of hogs and grain. The actual deliveries would be made later in the fall when the harvest was in and the sucklings fattened.